Mass grave excavated near disputed Iraqi city of Kirkuk

Dec 18, 2009, 10:20 GMT

Kirkuk - Iraqi investigators on Friday announced they had finished their excavation of a mass grave containing the bodies of 185 murdered Iraqi Kurds near the disputed northern city of Kirkuk.

The bodies were all those of women, children and the elderly killed between the years of 1988-1991, researchers from the Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights and the government of northern Iraq's quasi-autonomous Kurdish region said.

'The grave was at the site of the seat of one of the former regime's military units' in Tubzawa, some 12 kilometres west of Kirkuk, Abdallah Karim, of the Kirkuk office of the Ministry of Human Rights, told the German Press Agency dpa.

The bodies, as well as clothes and personal effects unearthed over the course of the investigation, which began on December 8, were being sent to a forensic laboratory for DNA tests to determine the identity of the victims, Karim said.

Beginning in 1987, former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's regime began a genocidal campaign to 'purify' - in the parlance of government reports from the time - the region around Kirkuk of ethnic Kurdish inhabitants.

Tens of thousands of civilians, including the entire population of some villages, were executed and some 2,000 villages were completely destroyed. Hundreds of others were forced to flee after their homes were destroyed, Human Rights Watch concluded after an 18-month investigation.

In the years since the 2003 fall of Saddam's regime, many Kurdish families have returned to the area. The current demographic makeup of the region is a continuing source of sore dispute in Iraqi politics, and was one of the issues that stalled passage of an electoral law to cover voting in the 2010 parliamentary elections.

Many Iraqi Kurds hope to make the city, and its nearby oilfields, the capital of a future independent state, calling it their 'Jerusalem.' Iraqi Arab and Turkmen politicians regard the city as an integral part of Iraq.